How Dingus and Zazzy Scaled to 140+ Employees Across 29 Countries in Under 2 Years (Interview with Co-Founder and COO Becca Kay)

Introduction and Speaker Background

Becca Kay

00:00Well, they say you should dress for the job you want. Right?

00:05For those of you who are wondering who let a small child in the unicorn onesie on stage, you can blame the organizers because they knew exactly what kind of shenanigans they were gonna get. And I you should see all the rejected titles for this talk. I can't believe they actually still let me on stage. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Becca Kingsbury. I'm co founder and COO of dingusandzazzy. We took everything

The Dingus and Zazzy Business Model

Becca Kay

00:27that people hated about the standard marketing agency, we productized it, and we turned it into a flat rate unlimited subscription. Our clients subscribe month to month, contract free for unlimited marketing work. And I mean, if you're curious about bad actual stuff, our booth's right out there if you wanna come say hi after this. All this growth, I'm gonna walk you through though, wouldn't be possible without awesome financial partners. That's good thing about her. Good Lord, did

00:50we do the research? And we ended up going with Founderpath and I'm so glad we did because they don't like boost? Well, they let us be ourselves and they don't question the weird things we spend the money on like Okay. Everybody look underneath your chairs please. Somebody's got something underneath their chair. Ready, set, go.

01:09Somebody has a $250 Lego card underneath their cart. There we go. Amazing. Congratulations. Please go build something weird with Legos. They don't question when we wanna spend their money on this kind of stuff and that's why they're awesome. So over the next twenty minutes, I'm gonna run you through all the times that we absolutely ate it. I'm gonna talk to you about how hiring the proper business school way is dead. It's dumb. It's become obsolete. I'm

From 4 People to 140+ Employees in 2 Years

Becca Kay

01:35gonna talk to you about how Gen z North Americans currently have this luxury of job hopping to get the next highest paycheck, and how going international ethically is the best way to scale and get employees that actually care. And finally, I'm gonna tell you about how we design every single role in our company, even the most entry level roles to directly correspond to our company's growth. So we started out just four of us working in this

02:02tiny little Harry Potter closet, and two years later we're now at over a 140 people in 29 different countries, and somehow I'm not dead yet. But as you probably might have guessed, we're not actually a SaaS company, sorry, but we are a SaaS plus, and we also come from a major SaaS background. We actually just opened our own private equity firm, and we're in the process of acquiring other SaaS companies. We've actually acquired three already. And

Early Hiring Mistakes and Local Talent Constraints

Becca Kay

02:31our mission is to essentially take over our own vertical integration and monetize it. So we fell on our face more times than I can count. When we first got started, we thought in order to have the most productive employees, they had to be right in front of us. We tried to hire locally. Don't do it. We're a cool fun company full of zany weirdos, so let's seek out and hire zany weirdos. That won't cause any problems.

02:57Right? Gosh. We use gut feelings to make hiring decisions. We figured you know, they seem to have the right credentials, their interview was okay, that should be good. We really liked the people we did hire in the end and when it didn't work out, we didn't let them go. We tried shoving them into other roles that they still weren't a fit for. It was like a bad boyfriend. We kept seeing all these red flags of these

03:21people and being like, but he'll change. Right? So when we started out, like I said, we were trying to hire all in one play place, but there wasn't enough candidates, nobody wanted to commute, there was only about a million people in the city, so the talent pool was super tiny. It was during COVID, so nobody wanted to come and hang out with us and have fun. And we were experiencing so much job hopping, every opportunity somebody

Pivoting to International Hiring

Becca Kay

03:48had to make a tiny bit more money, they were gone. I'm sure we've all been experiencing all of these issues, but we were bringing a lot of revenue and we were scaling and we we didn't have a choice. We had to challenge our own assumptions and we had to go elsewhere, we had to go international. So when's the last time one of you thought about Romania, Namibia, or Trinidad? Honestly, when we launch hiring ads in some

04:13of these places, we get over 400 applicants a day. And if your next thought is, okay, but how are they? What's the quality? That's where this comes in. We truly believe that no matter who in your company is hiring a candidate, they should almost always come to the same conclusion because it's not about gut feelings, it's about data. And that's why we personality and skill test every single applicant, and then we go into our interviews already

04:39winning because we know that they've passed the test. They are most likely a skill fit and a personality fit for our company. I will warn you guys, it's about $2 a year, but it's absolutely worth it. There are cheaper versions out there, but I wanted all of the data I could physically get so that we could make the best decisions. So since pivoting to a worldwide workforce, we actually have fallen in love with so many different

Top Hiring Countries and Building Wait Lists

Becca Kay

05:02countries. Our top four places that we have employees right now are Brazil, Colombia, Trinidad, and South Africa. And honestly South Africa would easily be my favorite country to hire in, but they get a ton of load shedding. For those of you who don't know what that is, it means they lose power for like hours and hours at a time, non stop every other day. But for the hardworking English speaking amazing people that we find there, it

05:27is completely worth buying the odd power generator or inverter to get that great employee. And now we have like now we have the best possible scenario because our recruiter in house builds us wait lists. We curate wait lists for every single one of our roles based on our projections, and when we need somebody, our our recruiter has them ready to go. And to be honest, there's no way we'd be able to build those kind of wait

05:52lists if we were doing this just in Canada. So that might this next thing, it's gonna sound like a luxury, but as soon as you can, stop hiring. As a founder, your time is way more valuable doing what you're actually good at, building your business. So as soon as you can, hand it off to somebody else. And we did actually try handing it off externally, and it wasn't for us, and that's okay. But we have a

In-House Recruiting and LinkedIn Recruiter Platform

Becca Kay

06:18full time in house recruiter, and she sends about a thousand messages a day just on LinkedIn. For those of you who have never heard about the LinkedIn recruiter platform, it's awesome. It is $10 a year, not including ad spend, but you can select all and message hundreds of potential candidates at once. And let's be honest, you could use your personal LinkedIn account, send 80 ish messages a day, probably get blocked for spamming and lose your account

06:44for gosh knows how long. The one thing to note though on this platform, super helpful, their setup process for getting somebody involved with this is archaic. So if you actually need access to the LinkedIn recruiter platform, please come talk to me after this. I'm just gonna introduce you to the right person so you don't have to jump through all the hoops. So I painted this pretty gorgeous picture of how awesome our team is and they are.

Three Hard Truths About Managing People

Becca Kay

07:07I love our team, but there are three hard truths that we had to learn. One, expect good people to change, even your best people. We don't know what our employees are going through personally on their day to day, and if somebody is an amazing hire and you wanna keep them around, it's up to you as the employer to adjust your expectations, not lower them, to make it work. Two, not all promotions work out. Sometimes when you

07:34promote somebody they just fall flat on their face. So we don't do that anymore. We instead promote in an interim role. So somebody can go in, they can try out the role, and we can really see if it's gonna be the right person, but also they're gonna see if it's right for them. And our employees know when they are trying out an interim role, they can go back to their old job at any time. They just

07:55have to say so because consent matters. And three, fire fast. I know that sounds harsh, but honestly if you feel that gut feeling that somebody's gotta go, don't wait. Please just get it done. It'll feel like a weight is lifted off of your shoulders afterwards, And if it doesn't, then you fired the wrong person. But unfortunately like I've had to do my fair share of removals, let's be honest, but looking back I knew every single one

08:24was the right move for our business. And again, it's like a bad boyfriend. They're not gonna change, so you need to just hurry up and move on. So training, hiring, building a business, it's all iteration. Right? And our training academy was no different. At first, when we were hiring somebody new, it was trial by fire. Come in, here's some tasks, let's go figure it out. It didn't work. It doesn't work. So we decided to try and

Training Iteration and the Dingus Academy

Becca Kay

08:52build a dingus academy, like a full farm team where we could bring people in, build up their skills, and then call them to the big leagues when we're ready for them. Unsustainable flop. We have now integrated this like 12 more times. It is a shadow of what it once was, but it's actually sustainable and productive, and we're gonna continue to improve it. So a few tools that are gonna make your guys'lives easier going internationally, having

Tools for Managing a Global Team

Becca Kay

09:16big teams. One is Time Doctor. It's at the end of the day, we're not a VC funded operation, so we really do care where our dollars and cents go. So this is how we know what people are working on, and yeah a couple employees were a little apprehensive about it at first, but it's one of the best tools that we have because it's how I can judge productivity, how I can judge coaching, how I can see

09:40our labor dollars per client, it's all there. And disclaimer, a couple of the features are a little too big brother y for our style and that's cool. We just don't use those features.

09:51Rome is a new one that our entire team is completely obsessed with. It is basically a virtual office to your team. A team member can come up and knock on my office door as if we were in the same physical building and just talk to me. No more you know messing around with setting up Google Meets and figuring it all out. It's just March right up, hey Eric, I gotta talk to you about this thing. Cool.

10:10Done. Carry on with your day. And it's a game changer. It's beta testing right now and there is a bit of a wait list to get on it, but it is some of the best communication we have had in a long time. This one is also awesome, and I'm sure you've all thought about it like you know, is AI just gonna take over the world and I my company will become irrelevant, But that's the wrong approach.

10:32We have been using AI to make our stuff, our team more productive and more efficient. And you've heard about all the standard ones, obviously, but one that's definitely worth considering is Jenny AI. Because it doesn't just do your writing for you, it writes along with you like a writing assistant and it actually makes your writing better.

10:52And okay, so we've talked at length about hiring, getting people in the door. What if you actually want them to stay afterwards?

Culture, Retention, and the Come-As-You-Are Policy

Becca Kay

10:59At dingusandzazzy, we have a come as you are policy, and we're one weird die job away from hiring the entire rainbow, let's be honest. But it's not that we're trying to seek out the weirdos in the room, it's that we have an internal referral process and a culture that attracts well, punk kids stunk in 2002. We even go as far as letting somebody be themselves in a client call. We don't care as long as they're respectful.

11:23So if you have green hair, face tattoos, and you wanna make fart jokes all day long, cool. As long as you're good at your job. And it's hard to directly correlate that to staff retention, but I think it's fair to say the more somebody can be themselves in an environment, the happier they're gonna be.

11:40Genuinely stand up for your staff. We will fire clients. We don't care. At the end of the day, a bad client contract isn't worth losing staff over. So I would way rather just fire the client. And at the end of the day, there are more nice people out there than off awful people. So we don't have to fire clients very often, but our staff know if we need to we have their backs and it'll be done.

12:07So you never want to be the smartest person in the room, and our company literally weeds out egos. And we are more than happy if the next person who comes in is better, smarter, more intelligent than the person before them or us. Because honestly, in a lot of environments, somebody challenging the way things are done is seen as like a threat to authority. In our company, we'll pay you a bonus for it. Every time a team

Bonuses, Stock Options, and Growth Incentives

Becca Kay

12:31member brings us an idea that we actually end up implementing, we give them cash for it.

12:37And another thing that we're doing to keep our team is Global Shares. So obviously we know stock options, great tool for employee retention, a lot of us talking about that this week, but we tried to figure out how to do it globally and we found Global Shares. It it was just required by JPMorgan, so it's actually free to use. And your employees in any country can log on and check on the status of their stock options

13:00at any time. So every single role, like I said earlier, in your company needs to directly contribute to your company's growth. Our CEO received this message the other day and I think it's awesome. This guy is a web developer. He's never spoken to a client before. He's not client facing in any way shape or form, but he gets it. And so how do you embed this level of growth, this mindset of growth into every level of

13:25your organization? One, celebrate your wins with everyone involved. We're super public about all of our wins, and we'll tag everyone from the original person who brought in the sale to all of the day to day operations people who are getting the work done for the client. This creates a great understanding to the entire team of what is actually needed to make a win possible. Two, build into your pay structure. At the end of the day, I've

Embedding Growth Mindset Across Every Role

Becca Kay

13:52already talked about we do pay out on bonuses. We do pay out bonuses on great ideas, but we also pay them out on referrals, reviews, upgrades, testimonials, the things that directly contribute to our company's growth. And third, hire competitive people. Even our basic administrative roles are still tested for competitiveness because at the end of the day, competitive people never stop striving to achieve, to outdo themselves, and to win. So add this all together and you've got

14:19people being socially, financially, and intrinsically motivated to help build the company with you. Alright. Well, in the last twenty minutes, you heard a lot of information. But here are some things that you should tattoo onto your eyeball balls so you remember them later. One, stop hiring to make your business school professor proud. Know that you can't fix people and that's okay, but you should be continuously improving your hiring practices so that you hire better people. Go

Key Takeaways and Closing

Becca Kay

14:45international with it and be smart about it because you need to stop restricting yourself by geography. Training, hiring, it's all gonna take iteration and it's okay to eat shit once in a while as long as you get better. Two, keep your people. I'm never getting a real job again. Who are we kidding? And most of my staff agrees. So light bad client contracts on fire before they cost you your good people. And I know it's ingrained

15:10in every single one of you founders out there to work your butt off, to do, to take it all on, make sure it happens, but eventually, you've got to take your skates off, coach from the bench, and your team's gonna be better off for it. So hire better players than you ever were. And finally, make sure all those players, every person on your team, that their roles, their incentives, and their bonuses are reflecting what is most

15:33important to you and your business. Happy clients, retention, and company growth. Thanks guys.